1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention relates generally to advertising, and more particularly for distributing advertising content to a network of personal computers.
2. Background Information
With the marked increase in the number of personal computers that are being used by the general populace for business and home activities, the use of personal computers as an advertising medium has become a burgeoning field. Using the Internet, a company can maintain a website whereby users can directly download and view advertising materials on their personal computer. However, one disadvantage of advertising on the Internet is that users need to know about the existence of a company's website. In this regard, the company needs to advertise its website or rely on search engines to provide to the user the Internet address of the user's company. Furthermore, to access the website the user needs to take an affirmative step and “navigate” to the web site. The term navigate is often referred to as the process of accessing a selected web page on the Internet. Disadvantageously, if the user never navigates to the company's website, the company is never given the opportunity to display its advertisements.
Another approach to providing advertisements via a computing environment is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,913,040, to Rakavy, et al. Rakavy describes an advertising system wherein advertisement data is periodically transmitted to a client computer. In Rakavy, advertisement data is displayed to a user during idle times of the computer such as when the computer is not receiving keyboard input or when the computer has not refreshed the screen for a predetermined period of time. Disadvantageously, in Rakavy, if a user actively uses his computer, the advertisement data is never displayed to the user.
Thus, there is a need for an improved advertisement system and method for displaying advertisements. The system and method should not require individuals to navigate to a web site before the user is able to view advertising materials. Furthermore, the system and method should be able to guarantee to advertisers that their advertisers will be displayed to a user of the computing environment, regardless of the user's actions.